Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
The Fire of Drift-wood
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (18071882)W
Whose windows, looking o’er the bay,
Gave to the sea-breeze, damp and cold,
An easy entrance, night and day.
The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,
The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,
The wooden houses, quaint and brown.
Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
Our voices only broke the gloom.
Of what we once had thought and said,
Of what had been and might have been,
And who was changed and who was dead,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.
Had something strange, I could but mark;
The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
As suddenly, from out the fire
Built of the wreck of stranded ships,
The flames would leap and then expire.
We thought of wrecks upon the main,
Of ships dismasted, that were hailed
And sent no answer back again.
The ocean, roaring up the beach,
The gusty blast, the bickering flames,
All mingled vaguely in our speech;
Of fancies floating through the brain,
The long-lost ventures of the heart,
That send no answers back again.
They were indeed too much akin,
The drift-wood fire without that burned,
The thoughts that burned and glowed within.